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Mt. Lebanon student’s play recognized by City Theatre

By Jacob Calvin Meyer staff Writer jmeyer@thealmanac.Net 3 min read
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Jack Horrigan doesn’t remember how he came up with the idea of the play he wrote.

Horrigan, now a freshman at Mt. Lebanon High School, wrote the play as an eighth-grader at Jefferson Middle School, and it was selected as a winner of City Theatre’s EQT Young Playwrights Contest.

He thinks the play about a New York Don who loses his daughter and tries to find the person who killed her is a combination of him being mad at his sister one day, he said jokingly, and him watching the famous movie, “The Godfather.”

City Theatre’s annual EQT Young Playwrights Contest accepts one-act plays from students in grades seven to 12 in Western Pennsylvania and northern West Virginia. Horrigan’s play, called “Family Honor,” was one of six plays selected this year.

Photo courtesy of Susan Morgans

Courtesy of Susan Morgans

Jack Horrigan

After “Family Honor” was chosen as a winner, it was performed on two different nights at City Theatre in late October. All of the students’ plays were directed by Maggie Sulka from City Theatre.

“It was an awesome experience,” Horrigan said. “A lot of people told me that they liked it which is all I can really ask for.”

The play’s description on City Theatre’s website is, “Don Benito Luciani is an aging Mafioso struggling to retain his political and social power. When a family member is brutally murdered, Benito and his ambitious daughter, Adriana must rush to catch the culprit and reassert the family’s control of the criminal underworld. This gripping thriller investigates how one family attempts to maintain its honor in the face of ambition and tragedy.”

Since he had never written a play before, he wasn’t considering writing a play for the contest until Kathryn Duchin, a middle school gifted coordinator, approached him and his friends about doing it.

He said the 30-page play took him about a month to write.

“Obviously I was told that I would be writing this play and so I kind of started working basically that night, and I kind of got a rough idea down. As I continued to work on it, it developed into that idea. I then spent the rest of that month doing a rough draft and editing it.”

Horrigan said before writing the play he never considered this as something he would enjoy. He enjoys movies, like most kids, but now he sees the delicate intricacies that go into writing a script or directing a play or show.

“I miss it now that it’s over, so I’m going to try to keep writing plays,” he said.

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